tomhudson writes: "Earlier this month, slashdot ran a story using Google Insight to track linux distribution popularity. This showed that Ubuntu was more popular in search queries. Now, by extending the same methodology, we can see that Ubuntu also has the highest rate of user dissatisfaction — more than all the top distros combined. This year's trend is not complete, but it's a safe bet that it will continue to lead the pack."

People don't complain about something if they don't use it. While I agree there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, I suspect there are fewer complaints about Suse or Fedora just because they're less popular.

Debian and Gentoo are not terribly difficult to install and administer these days, but they still have a rougher reputation than the others you listed. So more of their users are probably technical users, and fewer are the kind to be searching for help and then typing "Ubuntu sucks" in search engi

Look at the graphs before Ubuntu - the complaint rate for all the distros was almost non-existent compared to Ubuntu in the last 6 years.

If you're happy with your distro, you don't search for fixes. Taking into account Windows' much larger market share, even Windows comes off better than Ubuntu. Maybe now we've found the source of all those "I tried linux and I hated it, so I switched back to Windows" comments - they picked Ubuntu.